Film (1977). Landers-Roberts/Zeitman/Twentieth Century Fox. Directed by Jack Smight. Written by Alan Sharp, Lukas Heller, based on Damnation Alley (1969) by Roger Zelazny. Cast includes George Peppard, Dominique Sanda and Jan-Michael Vincent. 95 minutes cut to 91 minutes. Colour.

In this travesty the solitary, snarling, Hell's Angel protagonist of Zelazny's Post-Holocaust novel has become four fairly decent Air Force officers. There are almost no survivors of World War Three. The officers set out from the western USA to cross the country eastwards in "land-mobiles", seeking viable communities. The Holocaust has tilted Earth's axis, turning the sky into a display of glowing radiation and electrical storms, represented by astonishingly garish and inadequate process work from an obviously low-budget special-effects department. The encounter with mutated, carnivorous cockroaches stands out in an otherwise wholly laughable and random series of stereotyped adventures with murderous hillbillies, floods, a girl, a feral boy and several deaths. [PN]

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